October Issue 1999
Massive Southern Fine And Folk Arts Collection To Open At USC McKissick Museum
Sharecropping cotton farmers, summer tent revivals and other images of the South are the focus of an original exhibit at the University of South Carolina's McKissick Museum, in Columbia, SC, from Oct. 3 through Feb. 20, 2000.
Myth, Memory and Imagination: Universal Themes in the Life and Culture of the South is a major exhibition of more than 200 pieces of fine and folk art from the private collection of Julia J. Norrell. The paintings, photographs, sculptures and other art individually and collectively capture the essence of the South and Southerners' perspectives on life, dignity and death.
Norrell's choice of varied artists for her compilation has produced a spectrum of viewpoints on Southern culture. Although many pieces reaffirm classic Southern ideas, others contradict the classic Southern archetypes, which range from sharecroppers on hardscrabble farms to mothers in Appalachian shanties to holy-rolling preachers baptizing converts in the rivers.
Binding the exhibit, however, is how the South's religion and its ritual and rural traditions endure, in spite of modern urbanization.
Artists featured in the exhibition include Eldridge Bagley, a painter and native of rural Virginia; William Christenberry, a photographer from Alabama; Jonathan Green, a painter originally from Beaufort County who is well-known for his trademark bold images of Gullah culture; Walker Evans, a 1930s photographer from the Farm Security Administrations; Willie Little, a North Carolina sculptor; Deborah Luster, a contemporary photographer noted for her ability to capture man's primitive relationship with nature; and Bernice Sims, an Alabama painter who depicts autobiographical scenes from her rural Southern upbringing.
Norrell, an Arkansas native who lives in Washington, DC, developed a love for art while a student at the Holton Arms school in Washington and when she studied in India as a Fulbright scholar. While studying law at George Washington University, she landed a job at the Library of Congress so she could buy a painting. Already an avid collector of Southern literature, Norrell developed a passion for Southern art and traveled to galleries and museums worldwide. Among her most prized pieces is a large Jonathan Green painting titled The Passing of Eliose, an emotional piece that depicts the funeral of Green's grandmother.
In her essay, Going Home to Get My Tombstone, Norrell describes herself as "one of those Southerners who loved the South but hated the irrationality, hated the cruelty, hated the ignorance disguised by arrogance, hated the hate." In the same essay, she says that the collection is "about the search for meaning in a changing South; it is about belief and loss of belief and the piecing together of something like belief again; and it is about love of place, family and friends."
The exhibit will travel to museum venues nationally beginning in late 2000.
For further information check our SC Institutional Gallery listings or call the museum at 803/777-7251 or visit the museum's website at (www.cla.sc.edu/MCKS/index.htm).
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